Senator McCain announced on May 5, 2010 that he was withdrawing his support for the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010, S. 3002, that he and Senator Dorgan filed in February.  Senator McCain announced he will now collaborate with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) on a new bill that will enhance transparency and safety within the supplement industry, but McCain will abandon his support to impose new and onerous regulatory scheme on the dietary supplement industry.

Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the maverick political gunslinger who pillories his colleagues when they play fast and loose with the facts, apparently has a huge blind spot when it comes to dietary supplements.  Equally odd is that McCain is facing an already tough primary race against former Congressman J.D. Hayworth who has cut his teeth on opposing overreaches by the federal government, and McCain’s proposed legislation will essentially punish a large part of the senior population in Arizona who regularly use dietary supplements.

Senator McCain has joined forces with Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) in another attack on the dietary supplement industry with wild and unsubstantiated claims of hospitalization and deaths resulting from adverse reactions experienced by users of dietary supplements.  McCain has obviously taken a page from former Senator William Roth (R-DE) who embarrassed himself and the Senate in 1985 with a series of Senate Hearings on claims of deaths and hospitalizations resulting from use of weight-loss products that, when fully scrutinized, were exposed as more fiction than fact.

The McCain-Dorgan bill, mis-branded itself as the "Dietary Supplement and Safety Act of 2010," would dramatically expand the powers of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to ostensibly identify and withdraw from the market dietary supplements adulterated with steroids or other illegal substances.

That sounds good, but there is an elephant of a problem for McCain-Dorgan.

The FDA and DEA already have sufficient authority to remove either misbranded or mislabeled drugs, or to remove any product from the market that contains a steroid that is not approved as a drug.

But McCain-Dorgan grants enormous new powers and completely replaces the current definition of what "new dietary ingredients" are.  If anyone is unable to decipher what a "new dietary ingredient" is, then the Secretary of HHS gets to decide.  That should make consumers very happy.

Other provisions of the McCain-Dorgan bill impose onerous reporting requirements on dietary supplement manufacturers, and subjects manufacturers to being shut down by federal marshals if a mistake is made by a retail establishment or marketer of their product.  It is the kind of authority that McCain sharply criticizes in the health care reform debate as "big government control" over consumer choices.

When questioned, Senator McCain points to the abuses of professional athletes who use performance enhancing supplements as the basis for his dramatic expansion of federal regulations over the dietary supplement industry and to put a tourniquet on consumer access to these health promoting products.  The abuse of some products by pampered, overpaid, and impulsive professional athletes hardly justifies stripping consumer access to these safe dietary supplements, but Senator McCain sees no distinction between average consumers and those abusive professional athletes.

Even sports experts agree that strengthening existing rules on what products athletes can use, utilizing more technologically advanced testing procedures, and strengthening penalties for offenders is the right solution for abuses by professional athletes.

Senator Reid, who is not right very often these days, is dead on with his observation that Senator McCain is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.